The good news: of 6 expected failures, only 5 were observed; and 2 of the devices behaved as expected. The bad news: 13 of the devices had poor failure behavior.

Every failed device lost some amount of data or became massively corrupted under power faults.

Bit corruption hit 3 devices; 3 had shorn writes; 8 had serializability errors; one device lost 1/3 of its data; and 1 SSD bricked. The low-end hard drive had some unserializable writes, while the high-end drive had no power fault failures.

The 2 SSDs that had no failures? Both were MLC 2012 model years with a mid-range - $1.17/GB - price.

Some interesting research here, it seems like you must have a UPS for your Rig to avoid this issue. Anyone experienced SSD issues as a result of power loss like this Study Shown? Discuss.

I agree, as worrying as the implications sound, I really don't understand their strange misplaced sense of "not naming names"... as though they're trying to protect manufacturers privacy or something. Why on earth would anyone withhold the details of such a test?

Maybe a better source would care to replicate their efforts in a neutral and well planned way, and publish the full results for us...Tech Report?

Interesting (but not terribly surprising). Vendors tend to optimize for cost and performance, and need to hit their time-to-market window if they are to be competitive. Behavior under unusual operating conditions probably gets second (or third) priority.

I'm a big believer in UPSes (as well as ECC RAM, but that's a topic for another thread).

As far as the "not naming names" thing goes... I think that's standard practice for academic papers. Hopefully review sites will start paying attention to this issue. The review site has to be willing to risk bricking their review samples though... presumably, testing of this nature would need to be the *last* test run!

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

The ZDNet article links to a detailed .pdf with the details for these tests (except the names/brands for SSDs and HDDs)... Those are not very useful for anyone except the SSD/HDD manufacturers. The TL;DR version of these tests is a very obvious "some SSDs and HDDs can corrupt data during sudden power losses, so use UPS units, guys!" In my primary system with an SSD drive I haven't had any such issues during power losses, even during that nasty hurricane we had here, but it's always been connected to one of these: http://www.amazon.com/CyberPower-CP1500 ... 00429N19W/ with a software utility set to shut down my PC if the outage is longer than 5 minutes, so even if my SSD model/brand is the one that failed most of their tests - it has very little practical relevance to me (well, at least until my PSU dies suddenly... but that's less likely to happen compared to utility power loss, and I do full backups to external HDD enclosure which has its own PSU).

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I don't feel like reading the pdf. I wonder whether they had write-cache buffer flushing (or the equivalent - that's what it's called in Windows) enabled or not. I don't know that in true sudden power loss scenarios during actual writes that it would matter, maybe someone else can chime in. I always disable it though because I run a UPS and want MOAR PERFORMENCE

MS 'more information' help article:

Disk write-caching is a performance improvement feature, which is available on most disk drives. It allows applications to run faster by allowing them to proceed without waiting for data write-requests to be written to the disk. You can enable or disable this feature through the Disk Management snap-in.

Because write-caching does not actually write data to the hard disk drive until sometime after sending a "write done" message to the system, a power failure, or other ill-timed or inadvertent system shutdown may result in data loss. Use this setting if the possibility of data loss is an acceptable risk compared to the increased performance associated with writing to the cache and then to the hard disk instead of directly to the hard disk.

Information about Disk Management and write-caching is available on the web. Please see the following page in the Windows Server Technical Library:

... so even if my SSD model/brand is the one that failed most of their tests - it has very little practical relevance to me (well, at least until my PSU dies suddenly...

Or the UPS battery starts to go south, and the UPS's battery monitoring fails to detect that fact. I discovered this the hard way last time we had a breaker trip at work. UPS thought I had ~30 minutes of runtime, but it cut out suddenly after only 5. Bottom line: Change your UPS battery every ~3 years, whether you think it needs it or not!

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Ehh...this is why some of the pricier SSDs, including the Intel 320 series, have power failure capacitor(s) that store enough energy to permit the drive a graceful management of its data cache and most recent operating instructions before going dark.

Ehh...this is why some of the pricier SSDs, including the Intel 320 series, have power failure capacitor(s) that store enough energy to permit the drive a graceful management of its data cache and most recent operating instructions before going dark.

It's not like this even needs to increase the cost by much. 1 Farad supercaps are less than $2 in bulk. Charge one from the 5V rail and you've got enough stored energy to operate a SSD for several seconds -- which should be long enough to flush any internal caches and do a clean shutdown of the drive's firmware.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

It would cost a lot of money. Not because adding an array of capacitors bumps the bill of materials (BoM) to any significant degree.

Instead, it costs a lot of money if the much more expensive enterprise products are being replaced by cheaper consumer-level products with much lower pricetags. One could say that it is in the interest of the manufacturers to not make their consumer-level products too reliable. Otherwise, all computers would also be supplied with ECC memory which also adds only marginally to cost while vastly increasing reliability. Enterprise customers need reliable computing and are ready to pay for it. But if they pay the same price for consumer SSDs; this means a large market will get wasted.

Thus, the result is to politically separate certain features to more expensive products meant for enterprise and nearline customers, while consumers get fast but not-too-reliable products that their enterprise users will not dare to use.

However, aside from the already very dated Intel 320, the new Crucial M500 will have a special place in history, thanks to its many protections including power-safe capacitors, while being targeted as consumer product.

It would cost a lot of money. Not because adding an array of capacitors bumps the bill of materials (BoM) to any significant degree.

Product segmentation is an explanation, but not the only one. Typically the BOM for any consumer device will be shaved down to the last marginal penny, not because an extra $2 makes a big difference on a per-device basis, but because somebody is looking at what it will cost to produce them in 10k or 100k lots, versus the total expected revenue of selling 10k or 100k units after accounting for both fixed and variable costs. Variable costs will include DOA returns, long-term warranty support, sales and promotions, competition, unexpected market variations, etc., any of which could prove fatal to the product's margins or marketable life.

Power failure capacitors are a great idea, but most of the time the customer can't actually see them. However, they will see that your competitor's product is cheaper, and purchase accordingly.

It would cost a lot of money. Not because adding an array of capacitors bumps the bill of materials (BoM) to any significant degree.

Instead, it costs a lot of money if the much more expensive enterprise products are being replaced by cheaper consumer-level products with much lower pricetags. One could say that it is in the interest of the manufacturers to not make their consumer-level products too reliable. Otherwise, all computers would also be supplied with ECC memory which also adds only marginally to cost while vastly increasing reliability. Enterprise customers need reliable computing and are ready to pay for it. But if they pay the same price for consumer SSDs; this means a large market will get wasted.

Thus, the result is to politically separate certain features to more expensive products meant for enterprise and nearline customers, while consumers get fast but not-too-reliable products that their enterprise users will not dare to use.

However, aside from the already very dated Intel 320, the new Crucial M500 will have a special place in history, thanks to its many protections including power-safe capacitors, while being targeted as consumer product.

I can't stand big government stuff, but I would love to see a 20% "deliberately defective product" tax on non-ecc ram, set aside the funds to cover data recovery.A lot of the blame belongs to intel too, so I'd also put this on non-ecc capable chipsets/cpus. (mem controller has moved over the years)Volatile ram is not stable, its well proven.

The suppliers would quickly do some math and realize including 12.5% more chips would mean they could avoid the tax and still be cheaper on the market.

Other industries have had to toe the line (electrical/fire/safety codes etc, no you can't run 20A over that string) but computers have been blissfully avoiding it for too long, and everything is on a massive price spiral to the bottom anyways. There is a huge pressure in all industries to use commodity/consumer (COTS) stuff in place of actually reliable systems. FFS the latest russian probe probably died to this kind of mentality. (lets send this to space, who needs rad hardening? two of everything should cover it)

Back to the OP, regular hard drives suck too, randomly power them off and you'll get occasional data corruption. If your OS/file system don't assume this at every possible layer then you get bit rot. Enjoy!(sadly most don't, hence things like ZFS being born)

I can't stand big government stuff, but I would love to see a 20% "deliberately defective product" tax on non-ecc ram, set aside the funds to cover data recovery.A lot of the blame belongs to intel too, so I'd also put this on non-ecc capable chipsets/cpus. (mem controller has moved over the years)Volatile ram is not stable, its well proven.

That's a really horrible idea. You're effectively making everyone pay the data recovery costs for people who had critical data but were too stupid to back it up or pay for a system that had the kind of reliability they needed.

Educating users is the answer, not taxing everyone to cover ignorant users' asses.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

I can't stand big government stuff, but I would love to see a 20% "deliberately defective product" tax on non-ecc ram, set aside the funds to cover data recovery.A lot of the blame belongs to intel too, so I'd also put this on non-ecc capable chipsets/cpus. (mem controller has moved over the years)Volatile ram is not stable, its well proven.

That's a really horrible idea. You're effectively making everyone pay the data recovery costs for people who had critical data but were too stupid to back it up or pay for a system that had the kind of reliability they needed.

Educating users is the answer, not taxing everyone to cover ignorant users' asses.

Agreed. Given my usage pattern ECC RAM would be a waste of money. Besides, everything I care about is also multiply backed-up.

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